* I'll be in Washington D.C. on May 10 to speak on
the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The occasion is the "Protecting the
Information Commons" conference sponsored by Public Knowledge and the New
America Foundation. As a result, the next issue of the newsletter will be
delayed by a few days. http://makeashorterlink.com/?K20932BC

* I'm still
investigating a handful of possible new hosts for the FOS Newsletter and
discussion forum. Please forgive any ads that Topica may insert into the
newsletter before I finish picking a new host and making the
move.

* Postscript. It's important to remember that P2P music swapping is not
closely related to FOS. Most musicians copyright and price their music,
and don't consent to open access; free swapping violates their copyright and
violates their theory of how they can best make a living from their art.
By contrast, most scholars give away their articles and consent to open access;
free distribution increases their audience and the impact of their
research. In short, open access to music is harder to justify than open
access to scholarship. That's why it's significant when empirical evidence
shows that even musicians focused on the bottom line profit more from allowing
open access than from blocking it. We've seen open access provide a net
boost to sales again and again for scholarly books (see e.g. FOSN for 4/12/01,
9/14/01). The Baen Free Library has documented it for novels (FOSN for 4/22/02). The new Jupiter study shows it for music. When the
evidence sinks in, then even music and film executives should be able to see the
benefits of open access. Or, if not, then their stockholders should remove
them for missing an opportunity to maximize profit. When they see that
their threatened business model is actually inferior to a model based on open
access, they can back off their support for anti-circumvention, copyright
extension, and CBDTPA-mutilations of general purpose computers. Perhaps
even commercial publishers of scholarly journals will get the message, and at
least try open access experimentally.

It's also important to remember
that FOS for peer-reviewed research articles, and their preprints, is justified
and economically sustainable even if open access doesn't help the bottom line of
profit-seeking artists and publishers. But if open access did help the
bottom-line of commercial artists and publishers, then scientists and scholars
would no longer have to waste energy arguing that their corner of the publishing
industry is an exception to the general rule. They would no longer have to
combat the myth that preventing free copying is in the interest of all copyright
holders. If every sector of the publishing industry benefited from open
access, though for different reasons (research impact v. profit), then all the
sectors could collaborate in establishing the benefits and removing the barriers
to open access.

----------

Where are the DQA evaluation
procedures?

The Data Quality Act (DQA) allows citizens and corporations
to object that information disseminated by federal agencies, or used by agencies
in rule-making, is inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate (see FOSN for
4/1/02). Each federal agency must develop its own procedure for evaluating
corrections submitted by the public. May 1 was the deadline for agencies
to put draft evaluation procedures on their web sites for public comment.
By July 1, agencies must submit their revised procedures to the OMB for
review. Final versions of the procedures must be in place by October 1,
when the public may start submitting corrections.

It's time to
surf over to the web sites of the federal agencies most relevant to your work,
review their evaluation procedures, and submit comments --if you can find
them. I couldn't find draft evaluation procedures for the Environmental
Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Justice, Office
of Homeland Security, U.S. Copyright Office, or any other agency I tried.

The only draft procedure I've seen is for the Office of Science and
Technology, which advises the president on the implications of science and
technology for policy questions facing the nation.http://ostp.gov/html/DataQuality.html(Thanks to
EuroCrisNews.)

Either a lot of agencies have missed the May 1 deadline,
or a lot of agencies are hiding their procedures from their own search engines
and the general public.

There are two reasons to be impatient and hold
agencies to the deadline. (1) The procedures will affect how easily
disgruntled corporations can manipulate the system to duck regulations they
dislike. (2) The federal government is one of the leading providers of FOS
in the United States. The agency procedures will affect when federally
published science, for example, will be revised or retracted. After the
DQA, scientific peer review is not the only quality-control procedure on which
federal dissemination depends. The DQA makes federal dissemination depend
on a layer of legal-political review. These two reasons show that the
stakes are high in producing evaluation procedures that favor objective science
and resist campaigns of lobbying and censorship disguised as statistical
quibbling. Agencies that have already missed the May 1 deadline should get
on the ball. The public deserves every day of the comment
period.

One
of Google's smarter moves recently was to publish its API so that programmers
could build Google searching into their own programs. With a few lines of
code programmers can incorporate all the power of Google into a program, and
then with a few more lines tweak and vary this power to suit their needs or
visions. Some search innovations wouldn't work on their own but would very
well when added to the Google feature set. Some innovations would work
very well on their own but would work even better when applied to Google's index
of more then two billion continuously refreshed web pages.

Google's
decision to open its API will trigger an explosion of creativity in search
technology. If you have a special searching need not met by existing
search engines, it's likely that someone's Google-variant will soon meet your
need. If not, you can take a whack at doing it yourself. Here are
some of the Google-variants now online.

Google email interface,
from CapeClear.http://capescience.capeclear.com/google/(Send an email
to <google [at] capeclear.com> with the search string in the subject
line. CapeClear software will send you back an email of the top 10
results.)

There will be endless
Google variations as the word spreads, and I don't plan to cover them all.
After this list, which should stimulate your imagination, I'll only cover new
variations especially helpful to serious scholarly research.

I haven't
seen a page collecting links to Google variations. If you have, let me
know and I'll link to it here. Meantime, try one of these links to find
new variations.

*
Postscript. This week AOL dropped Overture and adopted Google as its
default search engine. Overture invented the pay-for-rank business model
for search engines, which assumes that users are more interested in shopping
than research. Overture is the leading search engine with the model, and
Google is the leading search engine that has refused to adopt it. From
this point of view, the AOL decision is a victory for objective searching over
the commercial rigging of search results.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/ebusiness/02GOOG.html

----------

Developments

*
The Open Society Institute (OSI) has announced a grant program in which it will
give $100,000 to help open-access journals publish research by authors from 67
developing nations. The grants will defray the costs of processing
accepted articles for free online dissemination. Peer-reviewed,
open-access journals in any academic field are eligible to apply. This is
a pilot program "inspired by the principles of the Budapest Open Access
Initiative". Grants will be given in two waves. Applications for the
first wave are due by June 14, and for the second wave by September 9.http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y25D521D

* On May 1,
the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) published its
manifesto, "Freedom of Access to Information, the Internet and Libraries and
Information Services". The manifesto calls for freedom of expression,
privacy and confidentiality of research, and internet access without "any form
of ideological, political or religious censorship [and without] economic
barriers". In case anyone thought the absence of economic barriers meant
affordable rather than free access, the statement reiterates: library and
internet access "should be without charge."http://www.ifla.org/III/misc/im-e.htm(Thanks to Gary
Price's VASND.)

* The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) is now
free of charge. CHIN archives over 2 million collection records and
200,000 images from Canadian cultural and natural history museums. It also
hosts information for collection professionals on creating and managing digital
content, intellectual property, and standards. At the same time that CHIN
dropped its access charges, it dropped the password gateway, enhanced its web
site, and added a search engine.http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/index.htmlhttp://www.chin.gc.ca/English/News/announcement.html(Thanks
to Klaus Graf.)

* The Gates Foundation has given OCLC a $9 million grant
to build a technical support portal for organizations (like public libraries)
that provide open access to knowledge and information. The portal will
focus "managing hardware and software, implementing advanced applications,
training staff and patrons, and delivering digital library services."http://makeashorterlink.com/?S384121D(Thanks to LIS
News.)

* The _Human Nature Review_ (HNR) has created a free, customizable
Explorer toolbar for searching online science and scholarship. It comes
with codes for a large number of searchable databases and instructions for
adding new ones on your own. Among the codes provided are those for
PubMed, CogPrints, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, AnthroNet, Natural
Science Update, FindArticles, the Encylopedia Britannica, Noesis (which I
co-edit with Tony Beavers), and more than a dozen others. It also includes
a code for Scirus, which searches arXiv, BioMed Central, and all Elsevier
ejournals. Users can run searches on a single database or across a list of
databases. http://human-nature.com/searchbar.html

* _Moxie_ is
an online magazine for women that provides free access to all its
articles. It just started charging authors $10 per submission, triggering
a wave of author protests. Apparently the new author fees are not designed
to subsidize free online access but simply to cover the costs of reading
submissions, which are ballooning as _Moxie_ becomes more popular. Fees
for accepted articles are refunded. (PS: _Moxie_ isn't a scholarly
journal and its authors write for money, so their protests are
understandable. Still, this is an interesting variation on the theme of
upfront financing that scholarly journals might investigate. Which is
better, (1) to charge authors or their sponsors only for accepted papers, or (2)
to charge for all submissions and refund the fees paid on accepted papers?
The former is narrowly tailored to the costs of online dissemination of accepted
papers, but requires higher payments than would be necessary if the costs were
spread over all submissions. The latter would reduce author/sponsor
payments, but would discourage multiple submissions. I see a difficult
balance of pros and cons on each side.)http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52168,00.html

* David Bollier has just published _Silent Theft: The Private
Plunder of our Common Wealth_ (Routledge, 2002), a wide-ranging book on the
enclosure of the commons in every sector of the economy, including the
privatization of public knowledge and the enclosure of the academic commons
(chapters 8 and 9). It's not free or online, but a description with TOC,
reviews, and links is free online. Bollier is a co-founder of Public
Knowledge and Director of the Information Commons Project at the New American
Foundation.http://www.silenttheft.com/

* A new eBook
in the Wiley Interscience Series in Discrete Mathematics and Optimization takes
a step forward in helping ebooks realize the potential of the digital
medium. _Graph Theory and Geography_ by Sandra Arlinghaus, William
Arlinghaus, and Frank Hilary contains dynamic, interactive maps and
graphs. Users may mark and move portions of these graphs and see the
results in real time.http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=355&nl

* The
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has launched a free online _WSIS
Newsletter_. The first issue is now online. The WSIS is a sequel to
the UN's Millennium Declaration, which also inspired HINARI, one of the largest
FOS initiatives donating scholarly ejournal subscriptions to developing
nations. WSIS has a much broader mandate than FOS, but includes FOS and
bridging the digital divide among its concerns.http://www.itu.int/wsis/news/news01.htm(Thanks to
EuroCrisNews.)

* The May 6
issue of _FirstMonday_ is now online. It contains several articles on
digitizing museum collections for the web, and these two other FOS-related
articles:http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_5/

* In the May 4
_Business Week_, Jane Black interviews Lawrence Lessig on his idea that Congress
should enact compulsory licenses for copyrighted digital content like music and
films. Quoting Lessig: "The record labels have launched lawsuits
against every company that has a model for distributing [music and
entertainment] content they can't control. That has sent a clear message
to venture capitalists: Don't deploy a technology that we don't approve
of, or we will sue you into the Dark Ages. The result is that the field
has been left to dinosaurs." The dinosaurs have persuaded Congress that we
face the false dilemma between "perfect protection or no protection" for digital
content. "No one is seriously arguing for no protection. They are
arguing for a balance...." http://makeashorterlink.com/?X219520D(Thanks to
QuickLinks.)

* Dan Gillmor's May 4 column is devoted to the content
industry's opposition to deep linking and ad skipping. In both cases
content publishers are trying to control how people use their products, even
when it hurts their own bottom line. For example, a ban on deep linking
would eliminate most of the incoming links to a newspaper. Gillmor's
diagnosis: this is control for the sake of control, "paranoia, stupidity,
and greed" run amok. Congress has rolled over for content publishers
because it hasn't yet heard from the fed-up and long-suffering public.http://makeashorterlink.com/?R364241D

* In the May 3
_Chronicle of Higher Education_ Marshall Poe tells why he didn't publish his
latest book with a "good" print publisher, why he published it himself on the
web, and what steps he went through to do so.http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i34/34b01501.htm(Accessibly
only to subscribers.)

* In
the May 3 _NewsBytes_ William Jackson brings us up to date on the Net Guard, the
"National Guard for the Net" that will mobilize to repair digital infrastructure
damaged by acts of war or terrorism (FOSN for 12/5/01). Congress is
considering Ron Wyden's bill to create the Net Guard. A related bill,
passed by the House and now in the Senate, would give about a billion dollars to
the NSF and NIST for research and education on net security. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176353.html

* In
the May 2 _New York Times_ David Pogue reviews free, shareware, and commercial
programs that not only convert text to speech, but convert the audio file to MP3
format. The result is a bridge from written texts to the P2P
music-swapping and MP3 music-playing infrastructure. (PS: The
companies that hire actors to dictate books on tape will never record serious
academic titles beyond a thin set of classics. Software like this is the
best hope for a large library of free online audio scholarship. See FOSN
for 10/5/01.)http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02STAT.html

*
In the May 2 _BBC News_, Mark Ward describes how grid computing is helping
astronomers. Astrogrid is a unified front end to the many astronomical
archives and data sets now online, and a channel to cope with the voluminous
data generated by digital telescopes and other instruments. For example,
the Visible & Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (Vista) will generate
100 GB of data every day. Astrogrid makes different archives and data sets
interoperable through its own metadata standard. The result is that
astronomers have access to x-ray, radio, magnetic, infra-red, and optical data
on a given celestial object, even if these data must be gathered from different
online sources.http://makeashorterlink.com/?J45221EC

* In the May 1
_Library Journal_, Carol Tenopir gives advice to searchers frustrated by the
multiplicity of overlapping, non-interoperable, searchable databases.http://makeashorterlink.com/?G4E5201D

* In the May
_Information Today_ Paula Hane tells what is known of the rise and fall of
Prestige Factor (PF), a Toronto company with a new way to the measure the impact
of scholarly journals. Like ISI, PF measured the frequency of citations,
but unlike ISI, it only counted citations to original research articles.
In February ISI sued PF for violating its intellectual property rights and in
March PF went out of business, apparently unable to bear the costs of defending
itself in court.http://www.infotoday.com/it/may02/hane1.htm

* In the
May _Computers in Libraries_, George Pike gives an excellent overview of how the
licensing (rather than sale) of electronic content to libraries increases
administrative complexity and costs for libraries and diminishes traditional
rights to copy and lend.http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/may02/pike.htm(Thanks
to LibLicense.)

* In the April 29 _CableWorld_, Staci Kramer interviews
Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner. Kellner asserts that skipping the
commercials on commercial TV is "theft". He allows that "there's a certain
amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom" but insists that "your contract
with the network when you get the show is [that] you're going to watch the
spots". Systematically skipping commercials is a violation of Turner's
intellectual property rights. (PS: I know this isn't FOS. But
ad-supported journals are one form of FOS and Kellner's fantasy may be pointer
to the future of ad-supported media. The lightning reflex to close pop-up
windows will be theft. The discipline to avert your eyes from blinking
text and keep reading will be theft. So the future of ad-supported online
media won't be pop-ups and blinking text. Perhaps it will be like the
scene from Clockwork Orange in which Alex is strapped into a chair and steel
clamps hold his eyelids open. But unlike Alex, we won't be watching a
deprogramming tape to dull our violent desires. We'll be watching ads for
hair dye, laxatives, and pick-up trucks. Unless someone straps people like
Kellner in the chair first.)http://makeashorterlink.com/?I4A812BC(Thanks to
C-FIT.)

* In the April
28 _Heise Online_, Stefan Krempl describes the Math-Net Page initiative from the
International Mathematics Union (IMU). A Math-Net Page at a university
math department web site hosts links to faculty and their online papers in a
standardized way that facilitates the collection of the linked pages by special
software run by the Math-Net portal. The goal is to produce a free online
archive of world mathematical literature, by encouraging mathematicians to post
their papers to their department sites and encouraging departments to post
Math-Net Pages. Krempl closes with a summary of major FOS initiatives from
arXiv and the Public Library of Science to the Budapest Open Access
Initiative. (The article is in German.)http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-28.04.02-004/(Thanks
to QuickLinks.)

*
Peru is considering a bill to require all government agencies to use open-source
software for all official purposes. The manager of Microsoft Peru wrote a
letter full of expostulation and FUD to Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez, a member
of the Peruvian Congress. Microsoft probably expected a politician
ignorant of technology policy issues, whose eyes glaze over quickly when they
come up, and eager to defer to the wealthy investor in the local economy.
But instead they found an informed and passionate proponent of open source who
understands the issues better than Microsoft and as well as any open-source
advocate who has ever written on these issues. It would have been easy for
Nuñez to pitch the Microsoft letter into the trash. After all, you can't
expect to convert Microsoft to open source. But instead of pitching it,
Nuñez wrote a lengthy public reply (April 8) that devastates Microsoft's
arguments with overwhelming detail and patience. Imagine a U.S.
Congressman writing such a long, articulate, candid, courteous, detailed,
informed, and persuasive open letter, let alone a letter taking this side of the
issue.http://makeashorterlink.com/?M1D0250D(Thanks to
C-FIT.)

* In the April _Charleston Advisor_, Margaret Landsman argues
that we need a new model of ebooks that goes beyond subscription to purchase,
beyond pricing by FTE, and beyond "one book / one user". (In general, she
thinks ebrary is on the right track.) A new model for ebooks will benefit
readers, researchers, libraries, publishers, and libraries what wish to become
publishers.http://charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=85&type=ed

*
An undated document at the AAP's Professional Scholarly Publishing site (undated
but listed on the "What's New" page) describes the top 10 issues on the minds of
traditional or non-FOS scholarly publishers. All 10 are worth reading, but
#3 is about online access. Here are three of the five bulleted points on
online access: "(*) Glut of free information impacts publishers directly
by creating the misperception that information should cost less. (*) Free
access is not free of cost. (*) Ease of access is the goal; immediate
access increases user productivity."http://www.pspcentral.org/committees/public_issues/hill_slowinski.doc

*
In FOSN for 4/22/02, I cited the February issue of the _ARL Bimonthly Report_
without a URL because the issue was not online at that time. But it's
online now. (While dated February, this issue appeared in April.)
The issue is devoted to open access and contains the following pieces:http://www.arl.org/newsltr/220/index.html

Edmund Sanders reports in the _Los Angeles Times_ that Hollywood's support
for the CBDTPA is not monolithic. Its apparent unity until now was a
carefully negotiated, tactical display hiding deep disagreements about one
another's turf advantages as well as the CBDTPA. Their divisions are
starting to emerge and may hinder the lobbying effort for the CBDTPA.

The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) has come out
against the CBDTPA. It has fought digital piracy longer than Hollywood,
but argues that CBDTPA is a dangerous solution to the problem. (PS:
SIIA's open letter makes such a good case that one is tempted to overlook the
fact that it is a staunch opponent of government-subsidized FOS and lobbied
Congress to kill the funds for PubScience. See FOS for 7/30/01.)

Mike Godwin in _ReasonOnline_ has a long and careful analysis of the two
industries clashing over the CBDTPA (so it's odd that he still calls it the
SSSCA). He points out that we know the clashing industry positions much
better than we know the positions of ordinary PC users and music/film
consumers.

Roger Parloff loves the DMCA and hates the CBDTPA. Perhaps his
critique of the CBDTPA, then, will be more persuasive to pro-Disney senators
than the critiques friendlier to digital freedom. "Though my guess is that
creators can adequately protect their digital wares without legislation of this
sort, if events should prove me wrong, the Hollings legislation should still be
defeated. If controlling digital property requires government intervention
on this scale, then there should be no such control. Digital technology
will have rebuffed the legal system's attempts to tame it, anti-protectionists
will have won the war, and it will be time for protectionists like me to raise
the white flag. We can't imperil everyone's freedom and prosperity in a
quixotic quest. The game has to end somewhere."

Eliot Van Buskirk has interviewed Rep. Rick Boucher, the most active
Congressional defender of fair-use rights and critic of the DMCA and
CBDTPA. Here's Part One of the interview. Part Two comes out in two
weeks.

Rep. Rick Boucher has been collecting public comments on the DMCA since
last summer in preparation for a bill to amend it. He now says that he's
ready and will submit his bill within a month. His amendment will revise
the anti-circumvention clause so that it only prohibits circumvention with the
intent to infringe. The effect will be to legalize circumvention for fair
use, research, personal back-ups, and migrating digital files to new
computers.

In a recent interview, Elcomsoft CEO Alexander Katalov defended his company
and the software that allegedly violates the DMCA. He described the DMCA
as a law that makes it "illegal to produce legal programs". On May 6, the
judge will either grant one of Elcomsoft's two motions to dismiss the charges or
set a trial date.

The state of New York has created a commission to study the privacy
problems created by making court case files freely available on the
internet. These files include dockets, court orders, and judicial
opinions, but not any sealed files which have traditionally been kept from the
public. The problems are not created by making private files public, but
by making public files easy to find and read rather than difficult. The
chairman of the commission is Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment scholar.

President Bush has stored his Texas gubernatorial records in his father's
presidential library, which is administered by the National Archives. The
National Archives can take 60-90 days to reply to requests for information from
the records, e.g. about Bush's ties to Enron. The open-record laws in
Texas require a reply within 10 days. The snag is that the National
Archives does not appear to be subject to Texas law, which is just the way the
President likes it. Last week the Texas Attorney General ruled that Texas
law, and the 10 day rule, do apply. No word yet on whether the President
would appeal.

* More on government-ordered purges of web content to keep it from
terrorists

Marydee Ojala points out (once again) that deleting internet content from
its home site or official source does not delete all copies from the
internet. So the practice has the evil intent of censorship without any of
the intended benefits. She criticizes the Federation of American
Scientists, "an organization dedicated to unfettered access to information", for
acquiescing in the purge of its site (FOSN for 3/4/02). "Using terrorism
as an excuse to pull information that should be public is detrimental to a
democratic society and repugnant to online professionals."

* On February 12, the Professional Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of
the AAP announced its awards for 2002. The PSP makes annual awards in 32
categories, including six for digital media. The Best Internet-Based
Electronic Product in Math/Science was Patty's Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology
Online from John Wiley & Sons (not free). In the counterpart category
for the social sciences and humanities, no award was given in 2002.
Likewise, no award was given in any of the remaining categories for digital
media. (PS: We accept that AAP will not recognize free online
resources. But should we infer that once these are put to one side, the
quality of remaining digital and online resources is not worth
recognizing? If not, then what should we infer?)